


Some Other Place To Stand

by AstridContraMundum



Series: Ere I turn away . . . [4]
Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: AU of S7, Episode: s07e03 Zenana, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-12 01:54:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28502550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstridContraMundum/pseuds/AstridContraMundum
Summary: When Morse came back from Venice, Max found him much changed.
Relationships: Max DeBryn/Endeavour Morse
Series: Ere I turn away . . . [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1508819
Comments: 20
Kudos: 20





	Some Other Place To Stand

When Morse came back from Venice, Max found him much changed.

There was something about him that seemed harder, colder, as if something inside him had lost its moorings. It wasn’t the vague despondency that Max had noted in Morse’s face before, nor the sort of soft despair that had fallen from his lips as they had stood in the doorway of Rufus Bura’s bath, brought forth almost wistfully in those three words.

_“You don’t say.”_

It was as if he had it all decided. As if he had told himself: Well, everything fades, and nothing lasts, so why fight it? As if he had been receding, back and back within himself, into some poorer version of himself … one that Max was not sure if he knew.

He had a new set to his jaw and a new sharpness in his eye, and even a new way of carrying himself, as if to put the world on notice.

It was all rather trying, actually.

But yet, as difficult as Morse was in those months—by turns waspish and preoccupied—Max never would have thought that he might prove to be the petty sort of man to take his bitterness out on those around him.

And he certainly never would never imagined he’d let that sharpness loose, allow his vitriol, or disillusionment or choked or despairing fury—or whatever the hell it was—to cloud his judgment to such an extent that he’d actually cross that line… the line he had so often made such a great show of holding.

***

Petra Cornwell lay sprawled on the pavement before them, dressed in a brightly patterned jumper and an overlarge coat strung round with a tattered faux-fur scarf. Her rounded face looked to be little more than that of an overgrown schoolgirl’s—and, indeed, the way her legs had fallen beneath her, gangly and graceless, made it to seem as if she still had not quite gotten use to their new length, as if she had not quite grown into them.

You could still see it, the heady good cheer, the sweetness of childhood, in her face. It was as if she had been playing a game of tag, and had fallen down laughing.

She could have been little Maudie, had she been granted the chance to live so long.

Max took a deep breath and swallowed hard against the bile rising in the back of his throat.

But it wasn’t only little Maudie that Max thought of, as he stood there on that gray and dismal day, but inexplicably of Morse, and of the day he had first met him, lanky and sloppy in his overlarge car coat, his auburn hair ruffled by the breeze from over the river, a summer dazzle of freckles against a face still touched with a bright sort of boyishness. 

_“Any chance of a lift?” he had asked, the hope clear in his face._

And yet here Morse stood, the very same man, looking down at the body of Petra Cornwell, not as she was—not as a young woman who had scarcely gotten the chance to be more than a girl, not as an undergrad who might once have been much like his very self—but as some _thing_ , like a puzzle, a difficulty to be sorted out.

Or no.

As an opportunity to prove that he had been right, all along.

Inspector Thursday, for his part, seemed utterly befuddled—so much so that it was almost painful to look upon him. The broad-shouldered man had always moved about the scene of crime with a brisk and unquestionable authority, but now he stood dotting about in just the same manner in which his great aunt Lottie so often did when she couldn’t quite remember whether or not she had put the kettle on.

Powerless, clearly, to reel Morse in.

Morse darted a sharp glance towards him, as if he sensed it, too, that weakness, that hesitation.

“Let’s not,” he said.

“How’s that?” Thursday asked.

Morse cast his face haughtily away. It was a dramatic little gesture, one that rang false, one that seemed to belong not to the Morse Max knew, but to an altogether different person.

To one whom—Max now realized—had been lurking there, biding his time, all along.

“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Morse said. 

“No. No,” Thursday protested. “Let’s not what?”

Morse spun around, then, his stubborn, angular face—one that Max had so often contemplated in the falling light of the garden, surreptitiously tracing the lines of its elegance—suddenly _too_ chiseled, as if made of unyielding marble rather than of flesh and bone.

“Let’s not clutch at straws to save our blushes. Three women, one man. It’s the same killer for all. Whoever killed Molly Andrews killed this young woman.”

“Oh, yeah?” Inspector Thursday asked. “You’d like that to be true, wouldn’t you? Show me up. ‘ _The old man’s losing his touch?’_ Is that it?”

Morse frowned in an exaggerated display of dismay, as if casting about to Strange… or did he even dare to think to _him?_ … for support.

“I didn’t … I didn’t say that.”

“You don’t need to,” Thursday said. “But before you get all high and mighty, let’s not forget you had all this down for Naomi Kaine’s killer.”

“Yes, I know. But if we’re being honest about it, when it comes to something like this, you’ve never really had that much touch to lose, have you?”

“Morse…” Strange cautioned, his eyes regarding him warily.

Max said nothing, only watched the scene, scarcely able to believe what was unfolding right there before him, willing at least one of the pair of them to come to their good senses…

It was like watching a group of pack animals when the younger senses the failing strength of the older and dives in for the challenge, in for the kill. It was astounding, the knowledge of just how fast it could happen, how it had been there all along—watching as Morse’s charming gracelessness— which Max had always taken for a refreshing sort of honesty—turned savage … even cruel.

Max, so accustomed to the smell of blood, felt his stomach churn.

“Well, it’s true,” Morse spat.

“This is what I get, is it? I’ve stuck my neck out for you more than you know.”

“Yes, of course you have,” Morse cried. “Who wouldn’t?”

And Max _had_ seen it, all along. During one of those impromptu visits, more than a year ago now, during the Creswell case when Morse had come to him for comfort, seeking the warmth of his sitting room, the warmth of the sun in his garden.

That beneath the guise of the proud stray cat, the tiger.

“I mean, bank robberies, car thieves, yeah, there’s no-one better… but if it’s something that demands a bit of intellect or finesse, then….”

“You arrogant, conceited…” Thursday seethed.

And then, Max could stand by no longer.

_“Gentlemen!”_

Amazingly, both men turned to look at him as if they had quite forgotten he was standing there.

That, he could forgive.

But, by god.

That they should forget Petra…

“You will conduct yourselves with the decorum and solemnity appropriate to the situation, or you will find some other place to stand,” Max said. “If you want to carry on like that, you find yourself another pathologist. Am I understood?”

Morse turned away, cast his gaze down, ran a flitting hand over his face.

“Max. I’m sorry,” he said, his voice softening, falling to its usual low and mournful timber, full of the roundness of the North as if to blunt those sharp edges, as if in an attempt to placate…

But the presumption there, the fact that Morse would use that name, here of all places, incensed Max all the further.

He was not, in this moment, speaking to him as Max, as that understanding colleague, that listening ear, that shoulder available to him whenever the whim came to him, whenever his meandering and thoughtless path brought him to his door.

But as Dr. DeBryn, a home office pathologist of some standing.

If Morse couldn’t find it in himself to be decent, he could at least be professional. And that was all.

“Am I understood?”

Max punctuated each word as if each syllable was its own separate reprimand, driving the point—once might only wish—home. A silence fell over the pair of them, then, and Max could only hope they felt it: a little of his anger, and all of his disappointment.

“Then shall we say two o’clock?” he said.

And then he picked up his kit and walked away.

  
***

Max went wearily along the towpath, the skies overhead gray and heavy, with the feeling that something within him was breaking, _had_ in fact been breaking, all of this terrible year.

This case had been hell.

Body after body.

It had gotten so that, every time he turned around, there he was, standing once again on that forlorn and scrubby little path—one that had once seemed innocent enough, wending its way along the water, but which now had turned deadly. A month would pass, or two, and there he would be again, standing over yet another body, in a merciless round of déjà vu.

But, as for now, he’d go home. He’d sit in his garden. Remember that there are some things that don’t change. That are just what they appear.

That something has to be lovely.

***

Max leaned back in the white iron-wrought chair, sitting alone in the chill of the garden as the evening breezes faded, settling the rustle of dried wildflowers and grasses into a hush.

He sat and waited as the world around him softened with the falling light, until the pain in his heart eased into a quiet kind of melancholy.

He sat in his garden until a new light formed a clouded halo in the darkening, overcast skies, the light of the rising moon.

He sat until he realized that he wasn’t merely taking in the wild beauty of his garden, the beauty of the deepening night.

He was waiting.

It was as if he expected to hear it, at any moment, the rumble of a car engine, the slow, contrite scuffle of footsteps around the path to his gate.

_Find some other place to stand,_ he had told him.

And perhaps he would.

Perhaps he might come to stand right here, in this very spot, with some .... oh, hell, Max didn’t know ... some excuse, some reason, some explanation or another as to why he had been so very difficult over the past turning of the year.

It wasn’t a far-fetched expectation. By now, Max had lost count of the times that Morse had shown up at his door.

Searching for something God only knew what.

For he highly doubted that Morse did.

When Max had first met Morse, he had thought that it was their similarities that had drawn them together—it was as if they were two twin intelligences living in a world that valued action, two men of thought who moved amongst men who lived by their guts, or even by their fists.

But as intelligent as Max was, he knew, at heart, that he was a simple man.

The scent of the earth, the light in the garden, a fine glass of Scotch, the due respect of his colleagues—there was little he required.

Whereas Morse, on the other hand, had, over the years, proved himself to be anything but simple—but rather, a tangle of contradictions that seemed impossible to unknot. Arrogant and awkward. Selfish and self-sacrificing. By turns coolly logical and utterly, inexplicably irrational.

There was something in those blue eyes both charming and affectionate…

… and which spoke of an endless chasm of need.

_“You’re needed,_ ” he had said.

And that was just when Morse came to him, wasn’t it? When he was needed?

When Morse was wanting for one thing or another?

Perhaps, Max thought, not for the first time, more than he had to give.

Perhaps it was time, far past time, for that bond to be severed, for that string, that sting, to be cut, letting the kite of his heart loose on the wind…

Because as the night grew darker, it was clear that Morse had taken him up on those words.

He had found some other place to stand.

Not here, not in his garden, but rather somewhere elsewhere.

That that was what Morse had, in fact, been doing all of this past year—finding some other place to stand, another table at which to sit and unburden himself, or perhaps even some other bed where he might lay his head.

_Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold._

And Max was, if nothing else, the ever-wearied centre, wasn’t he?

Well, let Morse go as he may.

Doubtless he would find his way back to the garden sooner or later.

That was how it ran, wasn’t it?

He would be back again, as sure as the rain, downcast and contrite, and doubtless Max would then hear the whole of it ....

Or ... if not the whole truth of it, than whatever truth Morse told himself, whatever truth Morse chose to believe.

It gave Max absolutely no joy to think of it, but he knew it could not help but be otherwise.

Whatever it was that had been on Morse’s mind and in his heart this past year, whatever was at the root of it, Max knew this:

No plant that bore such fruit could have its roots in wholesome soil.

And then Max sighed, with a breath like the evening wind.

Because the truth of it was, Max knew that he had already forgiven him.

Or, at least, he knew that he would forgive him, the moment he was asked.

And that he would be asked.

There was something in Morse’s makeup, at the very core of his nature, that seemed determined to drive people away. It would be tempting—indeed, _had_ been tempting at their first meeting—to repay such prickliness in kind.

But then, on that day long ago when Max had gone out to visit him in his exile at Witney, he had seen that other Morse—the one he had recently begun to imagine he had caught the glimmer of—standing before him clear.

Saw something there, in those eyes, trying—not to push him away—but rather to draw him in.

Not always successfully, perhaps, but always in the best way he knew how.

Always endeavouring.

After that, Max began it see it everywhere. Not only in those expressive eyes, but in Morse’s quirk of a smile when one of Max’s arrow-like quips had hit its mark, when Morse knew that he had once more been gotten the better of. In the flustered way Morse scrubbed up the waves at the back of his nape, when one of those quips had struck a little too close to the heart of the matter. A little too close to the heart. 

It was there in the solicitous slope of Morse’s shoulders as he had handed him that cracked pair of glasses as they stood by the truck at Wicklesham Quarry ... and beyond that, in the gesture itself, in the knowledge that Morse had bothered to pick the things up from the mortuary floor, to carry them about, when anyone with any sense could see that they were broken beyond repair. 

There are some friendships that go deeper than words— friendships that words can damage, but cannot break.

And then Max laughed, a soft thing, that sounded into the velvet darkness that had gathered around him.

_Or, perhaps, Max, old fellow,_ he thought, _you’re simply a besotted fool._

At which point, he snorted, softly chiding himself. And then he rose from iron-wrought table and went into the house, where he snapped off the still-burning lamps in the living room and closed up the drapes against the darkness. 

Perhaps it was because he had already been thinking of Yeats, but, as he began to shut the curtains of the window that looked out into the garden, he found himself pausing for a moment, murmuring other lines, lines from quite a different poem, as he looked out into the shadowed trees. 

_“How many have loved your moments of glad grace,_

_And loved your beauty with love false and true;_

_But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,_

_And loved the sorrows of your changing face.”_

He shook his head then, half-despairing of himself, and of what surely must be his one rare instance of idiocy. And then he shut the curtains and got ready for bed. 

**Author's Note:**

> Part 5, in which Morse returns from his second trip to Venice, will be the end of the series! Thanks for reading! <3


End file.
